I find that I tend to view my financial life in a fairly manic-depressive way.  I either have enough money and can buy all the small-to-medium things that catch my eye or I’m out of money and have to stop buying and go on a shopping diet.  I tend to view the transitions between the two as short lived and think of myself as being in one of those two basic states most of the time.  Obviously, I live my life attempting to maximize the amount of time I spend in the first state.  However, regardless of which of the two states I’m in I’ve found that it’s most useful to me to curb my shopping impulses.  After all, shopping when you don’t have money is obviously a bad plan, and shopping with the money you have today leaves you with less tomorrow so it’s certainly advantageous to minimize shopping no matter what.  In an effort to ease the hunger pains of my shopping diet I’ve started an effective system that involves using the tools at Amazon.com.

My wife and I use Amazon for most of our shopping.  We buy everything from some of our groceries to Christmas gifts, to furniture from Amazon.com and we have a “Prime” membership too.  That’s where, for $70 a year pre-paid, you get everything you order shipped 2-day, and upgrades to overnight shipping are only an additional $4 per item. (Yes you can over-night a sofa for only $4 more... I’ve done it.)  

So now when I see something that I want to buy, I go to Amazon.com and look up the item, read the reviews, comparison shop, and when I’m finally ready to buy, instead of clicking of the “Buy with 1-click” button, I click the “Add to Wish List” button.  I’ve mentally gotten 90% of the same experience I get when I buy the item, but instead of waiting a couple of days and then getting the item in the mail, the item never shows up. 

“THAT”S A CRAPPY PLAN!” you might be saying.  But I submit, that it’s not such a bad plan after all, and here’s why.  I get almost the same sense of satisfaction after wish-listing an item as I would from buying it because I’ve done all the same “shopping” stuff, I’ve picked what I want, and I’ve “finished” the task (I’m big into completion).   Usually with this type stuff, I don’t care “as much” about it a couple of days or weeks later so I don’t have the same feeling of loss when it doesn’t show up that I would have if I had just “tried to get it out of my head and forget about it.”  Plus, since I’ve added it to a list, there’s a chance that for my next Birthday/Christmas/Father’s Day/Wedding Anniversary/etc my wife/mother/child/friend may actually end up buying it for me since my Wish List is available to everybody that uses Amazon.

This feature of Amazon works even when you’re shopping at somebody else’s website.  By using their bookmarklet you can wish list things from any website on the internet. I’ve been doing this for months now.  In fact, my wish list is pages and pages long at this point.  Which is a good thing.  If somebody were to use my wish list to buy me a gift now, there are so many items on it that’s it’s almost as if they were walking into a custom store created just for me.  They can still pick something that they have some connection with or that they like more than other things.  I see it as simply creating a virtual store where I’m sure to like anything you buy there.  Amazon takes care of making sure two people don’t buy you the same thing, and they have a system that will hide the contents of the wish list from it’s owner.  Although it may seem unintuitive at first, this is a very handy feature.  My wish list is setup to hide from me the entire month of December and for weeks before my anniversary and Father’s Day.  This prevents me from accidentally noticing that somebody has purchased an item from my list and spoiling my surprise.

So, give it a try. Stop shopping at Amazon and start wish listing things.  Save money.  Get better gifts.  Make the lives of your friends and family easier.